Kristine Locker, Founder of Locker, On Building a Multimillion Dollar Fashion Tech And Betting Everything On What's Next

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1:03In case you missed it, you're allowed to be hot, smart, and rich. So let's get into it.

1:13Okay, Christine Locker, are you ready to get hot, smart, rich? Let's do it. I wanted to start with some, you know, people do rapid fire at the end, but I just feel like rapid fire will like let us get loose and we're probably going to get very deep. So I figured we'd start there. Perfect. Let's do it. What is your name for everybody that doesn't know? Christine Walker, now Pluger. What? Coffee, cocktail, or tea? Coffee. No, wait. Are you asking me? If you could only pick one for the rest of your life, coffee, cocktail, or tea? Definitely not tea. Matcha? No, I don't drink matcha. Okay. It tastes like dirt.

1:45Kind of agree, but like low-key, don't tell anybody that. I do not like matcha. Just the internet. What time do you wake up and what time do you usually go to bed at? I wake up between like 5.30 and 6 every day to an alarm. I used to do that before I started dating Courtney. Now what time do you wake up? Like 7. Oh, God, that's so late. I'm just kidding. No, it is late. It traumatizes me. But yeah, keep going. What time do you go to bed? I usually go to bed by like 10 or 11. And do you have a really good nighttime routine? Like do you read a book? What do you do before bed? Well, I used to until I got married or like started dating.

2:19Okay. But we watch like TV at night. What show are you binging? Grey's Anatomy right now. I feel like you're the third person that's told me that. Are you on the new season or old school? I'm old still. Okay. I think we're like on season seven right now. What is an item currently on your wish list? I just got one. I just got the Bottega. Which one? Well, I got the Andiamo. Is that the one that I have? That's one that you have in red. I got it in brown. I decided it didn't match with enough, so I returned it. Okay. And I just bought the Bottega. This is old and everyone's going to like at me for it because - Because you run a fashion company?

2:52Yeah, because it's old, but I still love it. I love that you like look in the camera. Yeah, whatever, everybody. No, I just got the pouch. What is your most regretted piece that you've purchased? Probably anything I've ever bought from Zara. Like such an impulse. Wait, I thought that was not at all going to be your answer. Like it was going to be like an expensive designer that you regretted buying, but it's really just like things you don't think through. Yeah, it's like things I buy too quickly that are really bad quality and then like you have to keep wearing them because you're like, why did I buy that?

3:22Yeah, and then also what do you do with it? You know, it's like you can't really like at least with designer you can resell it, which I'm like a huge proponent of. I think I'm a lot on trends as it relates to startups and beauty and like things that are like in my body. But fashion, like I am not the girl that's like setting trends. That's why I work with a stylist because I want to be. But like it's just not inherently in me. But like I always used to have such bad buying anxiety over like what if I get this bag now? Like the Bottega that I just got that I still don't even know the name of. I was like, well, that was in like even a season ago.

3:50Is it still going to be in? Do you just think Bottega is a brand that's like never going to go out again? I love them. What is a brand to watch that you're seeing trending on your app? Well, it depends. Are we talking luxury or are we talking – Did anything come to your brain for either luxury or just like mainstream? I mean the brand that is like currently being saved like a frenzy is like Park. Which we need to talk about. Yeah. So I have a very large message. I need to put my book away for anybody that is hating on the brands Park, Dairy Boy, and Set Active. And I say this as somebody that like has never bought Park, Dairy Boy, or Set Active, okay?

4:24They are doing a tale as old as time, a proven financial trick, not even trick, a proven financial system. They are using something called a negative cash conversion cycle. And this is how most fashion brands that have not raised venture capital have built billion dollar companies like a Gymshark. Gymshark literally uses their supply chain to fuel the growth of their company. A negative cash conversion cycle for anybody that doesn't know is essentially allowing, you have to measure the amount of time it takes you to get your inventory from your supplier, how long you have to pay them back, how quickly you can get them to your customer, how long it takes you to actually receive the payment from your customer.

5:06If you get the money from your customer before you pay your supplier, you essentially have a negative cash conversion cycle. You therefore can use your inventory to fuel your growth. The amount of hate that these girls are getting over a financial tool that has been used by millions of companies is crazy to me. What do you think about all of this hate towards Park and Dairy Boy and Set Active? I think it's crazy. We actually, right before this, I had a call with the Park team. We've worked with them to do like community giveaways for Locker, which is amazing. I don't understand it people on the consumer side don't know what goes into building the business and I think Chelsea Park in particular in this case was accused of creating like scarcity which by the way can I just interrupt for a second scarcity marketing is the number one marketing trick in the world like that is what every brand uses like why don't you direct your hate towards Chanel and Bottega then yeah and she was saying like essentially because I just like told her on the call I was like you handled that so beautifully I was like it's hard to even have to feel that you need to apologize for people freaking out that they couldn't get a product that you couldn't have predicted the amount of traffic that came to your website regardless but she was like yeah we were accused of scarcity marketing which like obviously you want to create demand for your product she was like but we were not trying to trick people people she was like we were not if we could have sold 80 ,000 sweatshirts we would have sold 80 ,000 sweatshirts we planned this drop months ago and could never have predicted that this would have been so for anybody that's listening that doesn't know what's happening so these are all brands I would say that have been started by creators like oh we were what a set active uh dairy boy uh park daily drills and they're founded by creators and they were accused almost all of them over the last few months of essentially using scarcity and a drop model to like almost create a frenzy for women that wanted to go onto their site and buy it that weren't able to get it.

7:04And the feedback and the backlash on TikTok was almost like such toxic hate towards the female founders that they had to come online and basically make apology videos. And in the process actually open up what stress they're dealing with as a founder to be able to like manage orders that they never thought were going to come in and you spoke to Chelsea directly and what else did she have to say about it? She just said that for like they she obviously never wants anybody to feel this way about her business until like going forward they're going to be adjusting how they think about inventory going like I guess inventory going forward but it's hard to predict you don't want to order too much you don't want to order not enough it's like really hard on them.

7:49Because you said that's like the number one product that's trending on your company can you just give a little bit of a background and like more like the functional side of what Locker is supposed to do? Yeah. So essentially my background is not in this space at all. I started my career in real estate. So I built Locker to solve my own personal pain points. You can think about Locker essentially like Pinterest for online shopping. So if you're browsing on any brand website, you can save any product that you want to think about buying to your Locker to save it for later. And then each user, like you have a profile, I have a profile, we can follow each other.

8:18So there's a social component to it as well. So you can create a giftable wishlist, send your wishlist to anybody you want and share your curations as a non-influencer. And so when you, when you're looking at the backend side of it, you're seeing that something like Park is trending. Are you sending that to her ahead of a drop and being like, by the way, we're seeing like a ton of influx or how do you usually work with brands? Yeah. For Park in particular, it doesn't necessarily work that way because they are on more of like a drop model versus like a free people or an anthropology or revolve that doesn't function in that way so for somebody like park the products that we're seeing post drop doesn't necessarily help them from a data perspective because they've either sold out or like we could tell them for maybe things that didn't sell in the drop but it wouldn't be as impactful impactful but for brands like revolve or free people we can see which ones of their products are being saved which ones are being converted on and we can share that data with them Are there any like big trends that you can see based on what is being saved for spring?

9:19Or like what are people even shopping for right now in February? Spring break. Spring break's been the number one searched term on Locker since December. Wow. And so what are people saving? Like what brands or products? Like what do you think is like the most sought after right now? Minus park. Yeah. I mean, park wouldn't really even like fall into spring break necessarily. But like for spring break, we've been seeing like a ton of like anything sequin this year. Interesting. Sequin skirts, sequin dresses, like sequin embellishment too, which is really interesting. Also the demographic you have to remember for the most part is like 18 to 34.

9:51Okay. So like, I don't know. Yeah, college girls or post-college. Yeah, exactly. Like planning out their spring break outfits. In terms of brands, it's kind of across like what you would imagine. It's the revolves. It's free people. We see a ton of like small owned businesses. Emerging businesses or brands and designers. Yeah. Which is always really fun to see. And so when a user is downloading Locker, they're doing it to essentially plan what they want to buy for different trips or purchases. Are they also like creating looks with those items? Yeah, we have our collage features so people can put looks together.

10:23You can also just essentially like I don't use the collage feature as much. I just put everything look wise in a collection and I can like envision, OK, these jeans with this top or whatever. But people put collages together and be like this top, this skirt, these shoes, sunglasses and bag. Do you find for your personal style, like where do you find your inspiration from? I feel like it's like a combination of things. I'll, I mean, I do a lot of searching on social media in general. Like I love looking at influencers and what they're wearing or my friends. And then from there I go and like find it.

10:53Yes. I was actually going to ask you like, who are the influencers or creators that you actually look to for fashion style? Do you know who Styled Sarah is? No. Oh my God. Sarah Walker. She's an LA girl. styled sarah is her user okay i'm obsessed with is she a locker user no okay she's on my like list list wait this is literally christine this is why you're one of my best friends and we also work together because it's like i literally wrote favorite people to follow and then celebrity like creator wishlist like so she's on the wish she's on my wishlist okay keep going for people you want to work with and who you also look to for style yeah so styled sarah's if i could replace my closet with one person's it would be hers she has an incredible closet okay who else do i like really love style wise i feel like i mean celebrity wise like hailey b burr yeah also do you know who lauren ratner is yes okay i'm obsessed with her too gab waller does a lot of her sourcing i just recently noticed that yeah i was like gap i'm obsessed with her yeah she's so cool yeah she's so cool i love her she's the president of road yeah yeah which is also so cool we love strong women yeah i feel like that is the total new era by the way of influence is somebody that has something outside of being a creator it is such a double-edged sword to have so much stuff going on because for me like not only am I running like this morning my day is like I talked to three LP investors then I had to deal with my flood obviously so it's a little different then I was like trying to film some content then I'm doing the podcast and so I feel like that is the new era of influence where it has somebody that's doing something outside of their job like a Lauren Ratner but it is so challenging like do you even find it's so hard to like make content and also run a tech company yeah I wish something's always got to give like I wish I could be so much better with content and sometimes like I'll get ready and I do my hair for the day because I don't always look like this when I'm working like sometimes it's totally different but like on a day that I get ready and I get showered and I feel like okay I look really pretty today you're gonna make content yeah and then like my day fills up with calls or people are after me in slack and like the whole day's gone I'm like I didn't film anything and then I'm like disappointed in myself because like I think content from a founder is really cool and I should be doing more, but it's really hard.

13:03I look at someone like, do you know, Grace Beverly? No. She actually has an amazing podcast for people listening to this. It's called working hard or hardly working. She runs like three companies. I was on her YouTube this morning. She's doing like obviously her podcast, which is always in the top 50 podcast charts. She's also creating like vlogs every single week. She's doing like sit-downs. I just don't know how people do it. And I honestly feel like for me, I used to have a lot more time because during the nights, like I was single and I could just be really selfish with my time. I do find when you are in a relationship and you're doing these big things, like we're thinking about moving and like, Oh, I'm just like, when am I going to find the time for this?

13:41It's exhausting. What does a typical day look like for you that now has, how big of a team do you have? Seven of us. So seven people, like what is a typical day in your life? I try not to schedule any calls before 9am, which I'm curious when you take calls or like, if you have any boundaries around all day every day but do you take like an 8 a.m call never like unless I like right now we're raising money so I did this morning because it's just like I and I was also traveling Tuesday and Wednesday I flew to New York and flew back within 24 hours that was crazy yeah like that's what I'm saying is like my life is just so unpredictable right now that like if I have to do it I will but on a normal week like I'm definitely not taking a call before 10 a.m Okay.

14:18I try not to take calls before 9 a.m. I wake up between 5.30 and 6, do some sort of movement in the morning, walk the dog. Every morning when I walk, I talk to my mom on the phone. That's like my time to be able to catch up with her. And then I like always have to shower before work. So like shower. And then by the time I'm like ready to go, it's 9 a.m. Every day is different in terms of calls. You know what I need to get better at? What? Is like time blocking days to have call days and no call days. I do that. I do that. It is crazy. You will think like, oh, my week's not that bad. I'm going to have time for creativity or like think bigger picture.

14:50And then all of a sudden, like the days just fill up. And like the maximum time I'll have between calls is 30 minutes. I'm like, when do I eat lunch? When do I do anything? Don't you feel like when you're a CEO or you manage people, like you actually don't do anything that you need to get done during the day? And at like 5 or 6 o 'clock, that's when you actually do work? Yes. Yes. By like 4 o 'clock. Which means you have no life. Yeah, I have no life. I have no life. I like try. I'm trying to be better about like having a life with my husband right now. Because it's just hard. Yeah. But like, yeah.

15:16Because you're how many years into building Locker? I'm almost at five. And I think that's like such an important point is that there's, and Courtney said this in the last episode, like there are different times in your life where like you have to sacrifice other parts. And it's like when you're in your first even like three to four years of like getting your team set up and understanding like what your product market fit is, like it's just a time to really sacrifice a lot else and focus on your business. But now it sounds like you're in a season where you're like, you just hired a head of engineering, like you now need to also focus on other parts of your life?

15:47Do you feel like a push and pull all the time? I definitely am still confused as to like how much I can lean into my life versus like lean out of the business, not leaning out of the business, but like having a more regular life because I definitely don't have a regular life. I'm still constantly building, if that makes sense. I mean, like candidly, I'm 32. I'm going to be 33 this year. and while I think that women can have babies at any age that they want I still think about that as like I really just want to understand for myself what is important to me and I don't want to have any regrets in terms of building the business and building my life so I'm not there yet but I'm like thinking about how to like build my life around it it's such an important conversation that I feel like people are starting to have where I think we came from an era especially with you and I both being the same age, like when I was 25 to 30, I think it was the era of like run through walls, sacrifice everything to like have this independence and like build a business that you're proud of and have something that like is yours.

16:50And I think now there's so many females in our positions that are like, that's not all that we want though. And like, I remember saying this to my therapist, like my worst nightmare is working so hard because I used to be like that. Like I would sacrifice everything for my career and for my job and to be somebody and have these like huge aspirations. And I think I got to the point where I was like, my worst fear is literally waking up at 45 with all of the money in the world and having nobody to share that with. Like that, the idea of that breaks my heart. But I feel like for some reason, if women have that conversation where they're like, my job isn't everything.

17:26And like, I still want to be successful, but like have a life outside of work. It almost like will hurt you when you go to fundraise or will make people judge you like oh well you don't sacrifice everything for your business like do you feel that I guess you said you are confused about that how do you ration that in your head to make it make sense I mean I think I'm having the same fear as you or that you were having it would be my worst nightmare to have sacrificed whether it's like me having children and my parents not being around for that yeah I guess really for me it's like my parents age and them not being around for it.

18:02How old are your parents? They're going to be 70 this year. So they're not super old. And my parents are very young 70, but I can't fathom sacrificing like their experience as grandchildren and my children's experience with them. And so for me, yeah, I don't want to wake up and regret that I like waited because I was building this business and I was too busy to think about it when I'm reality. I think I can do both. And I think I could do both really well. It's just a matter of like the external perception of it that I'm, that's where I'm grappling. And I think it's like so interesting is one of the things that I've heard from a lot of really successful female mother entrepreneurs, investor CEOs is that they feel like a child gives them purpose.

18:41Like they my sister has such great boundaries from like the hours of five o 'clock until 830 p.m. at night. Like she is completely unavailable Eastern Standard Time. I'll still text her a million times and she will literally not open it till she's done with her child because she's like, that is my purpose of being here. and it's still, she is still working from 8.30 at night until whenever the job is done. And it's like, it's not as if you can just be like one day, like, oh, I'm done with this and whatever. You still have that grind inside of you. But I think it, what I've heard at least from a lot of moms that it does give you a lot of purpose and a lot of like just reason outside of work to disconnect because I still feel when I'm off or trying to take a weekend, like I'm still working 24 seven.

19:22Are you? Always. Yeah. So to get Locker to that place, you've been building it for five years, Like walk us through the progression of like when you started to where you are today. Yeah. So I started it by myself. I just was like had the idea in my head. Started sketching locker on a piece of paper. Was like this is the experience that I want as a consumer and like how can I build it. Hired two independent contractor engineers who were still in college. And then after a couple years. How much was it by the way? Do you remember? Like how much they cost? Yeah. Well I put$225 ,000 of my own money into the business.

19:52And that was over two years. So you invested$250 ,000 of your own money to get it off the ground, basically. Yeah,$225 ,000 of my own money to get it off the ground for two years. And you made that money from working at Goldman? Yeah, Goldman and then being a commercial real estate broker. Crazy. Yeah. And so the company was bootstrapped for that first two years. Getting our first 10 ,000 users was a part of that money. And then in June of 2022, we raised our first million, which actually came from a user of the platform, which was insane. And you also went to college with her or no? I did. She was a year younger than me.

20:26And I think that's what people like, they're always like, how do I find investors? Or like, what do I do? And I'm like, literally everything that you did. Like, I always say the first best step is like literally drawing it out on paper. Like, what is this actually going to be? And then it's also just like leveraging your network and your competitive advantage, which to you was like the people that you went to school with. One angel investor who just believed in the business wholeheartedly and was like, I'm going to put a million in, which was insane. That allowed me to hire my first full-time employee, which just changed.

20:55What was your first employee? An engineer. Okay. We're a tech company. We needed an engineer. So he came on and we completely redid the platform. So like how people would experience locker today started in 2022. We relaunched after hiring that engineer in November of 2022. Yeah. And then since then, now there's seven employees, four engineers, myself, a head of marketing and a social media manager. and I think kind of like for the next phase and like how I'm thinking about 2025 so 2024 for us what was really important to me was like our revenue strategy how can I monetize them and how sustainable is that monetization monetization strategy we were extremely successful at that in 2024 so for me 2025 is like growth on the team side and the user side so like if we can grow our users that means we can grow our revenue because that strategy is like locked down but the team also needs to grow.

21:46Like I've been so cognizant about how we, how we've spent money as a company, obviously with my background being in finance, I'm like every dollar, what's our return on it? How does that work? But now I want to hire the right people to build the best product. And there's so much that we want to do. We just need more people. So we're currently recruiting for a few more engineers as well. There's so many things I want to say to all of this, but I think one thing that you said that's so interesting is one, starting with like having one objective for the year. Do you guys do a formal like OKR KPI process?

22:18Yeah, we do like a road. It's like a road mapping process and you break it down by quarter with like kind of these big overarching year goals. So same thing for us. We actually do. And we just set this up like honestly at the beginning of or at the end of 2024 going into 2025, because I think for me, I was like similar actually to Locker. Like I think about HSR like a tech company where it's like, OK, like we are doing what ARR, like how many like followers we have. I would think about that as users. And so I think for me, it was going from like a devoted niche to an engaged mass. And I think for me for so long, having this like tight knit community was so important because it was like, I would rather have a thousand true fans than have like a hundred thousand people that literally don't care about you.

22:57I think that's actually one of the reasons we actually help each other so much with what we do because it's like, yes, we have a formal relationship as an advisor and as an investor to Locker. But beyond that, I think our communities and like the foundation of HSR and Locker are actually so fundamentally similar because there's like a shared mission. So the way that I thought about HSR going into this year was like, how can I go from like a devoted niche to an engaged mass, which means like acquiring more followers or users, as you could say. And that's why even the podcast became such a priority for me because I had been putting it off for so long being like, things are going great.

23:31Like why rock the boat type of thing. But it's like for us to actually be able to deliver true value for people. It's like we needed to make a change. What are some of the ways that you're making a change this year to like grow the business in terms of users and what did you what else did you say users and what team and team yeah for on the user side so I think it's two different ways that we're thinking about it one is product-led growth which is always going to be our best and most sustainable growth strategy so like what can we build into the product that's going to bring natural growth and then the other side is like investing in paid we've done no paid advertising to date which is incredible but also like incredible businesses also do paid advertising and like find their niches and from there like you know invest in what's working really well so we haven't even tested that so we don't even know if we put paid behind something like how can we skyrocket that growth and then like find what's working and like double down on that so I think that's what we're really focused on doing is find what works for us you have 200 ,000 users now um and what is your cac it's like 20 cents 20 cents yeah so how did you go and acquire those users like for somebody that's listening that wants to build a tech company.

24:36What are the strategies and the channels that actually work and convert to get you 200 ,000 users with a 20 cent CAC? Yeah, I think for us, it's all been about community. So word of mouth, how can you build a product that people are so excited about that they just want to talk about it on social media. And then we also like, there have been some product things. We built the Locker Shopping Club. MG, when she joined the team, built out the Locker Shopping Club, which is essentially our internal referral program. People can invite their friends and they earn cash rewards by doing that. And I think that's one of the really important things to me and like what I would tell other founders to do too is like there's two different ways to reward your customers.

25:12You can do it up front. So like there are apps that would pay you$50 to join now and then you can do it on the backside. And my opinion has always been to do it on the backside. Bring in these people who are natural users of your product, get them to love it, and then reward them for being here and like keep them happy versus if you bring someone in giving them money up front. Like an influencer maybe not even an influencer but like let's say we gave people 50 to sign up for locker which one of my portfolio companies has done and it's like so evident between the difference of community that you have versus them which is so hard to figure out because I will say like from a product perspective functionally the tool I'm thinking of actually does make so much sense and like I personally love it and I just like struggle with like why is that not working for them to lead with product led growth versus like they do have to offer customers$50 to acquire them.

26:06Yeah. I mean, I think it's what the way that I always think about when you offer money upfront is you're going to reach a much bigger audience, but they're not your right audience. And so they're not going to stick around for as long as you would want them to, because yeah, of course, of course, it's easy to get people. I want$50. Like give me$50. I'll take, and I'll use anything for$50 upfront, but maybe I like didn't actually want it, or I wasn't actually ready for it or it's not the right product for me. And so now you've spent money acquiring this user who's not your actual user. And so I want to build ways.

26:37We launched our payback program, which is essentially if I buy something out of my own locker, I can make cash back. Or if I buy something out of your locker, I make cash back and you make commission. And that, to me, is such a clear way of building product-led growth where people come into the product, they use it, they save something, they buy something. That's like the full life cycle of a user. And then I'm like, here's some money. and come back and do it again and do it again and do it again. And so we'll invest very heavily in that. But I think having product-led growth, you also have to have like an awareness campaign because people have to know about payback.